It may be an urban legend but there is a story about signs in the New Jersey Capitol.

One of the counties in New Jersey is 'Middlesex County'. According to the story, the county office in the state house is located between restrooms. If you walk down the hall you will see, 'Men', 'Middlesex' and 'Women'.

Sadly, it must be a legend. There are Middlesex Counties in Virginia and Massachusetts as well as New Jersey. Middlesex county is in England.

In trying to find the derivation, all I can come up with is Essex was the land of Saxons, which makes sense in old English. I can't find the derivation of 'middle'!

I presume it's in between Essex (East Saxons) and Wessex (West Saxons).

We must make the leap sometimes that 'middle' means 'middle' and has for over 500 or 1000 years.

It astounds me that we are so connected with our ancestors and predecessors. An amazing connection.

(I love having all the information at my fingertips, too! Amazing!)

I believe "mid" derives from the Latin, so it should have been in use in that sense in the Dark Ages.

Had to revive this thread because a friend of mine reminded me of one yesterday that I still can't get my head around. MyCity's largest industry is military and space research and development, so almost all of the signs and billboards at our airport feature helicopters and space shuttles and the like. (Which has always made me wonder: do they really have that many people flying into our airport who are in the market for troop transport helicopters that it's worth the money to advertise? I mean, they don't put a phone number on there for where to order one . . .)

Anyway, the ad that's confused me for ages was the one with a majestic ICBM (missile) soaring across it, being plucked out of the air by a badly-photoshopped bald eagle in front of a waving American flag. The only thing missing is a caption like "America: we're *bleep*ing awesome!"

What gets me, though, is what exactly is this advertising? "Our missiles are so slow that an ordinary eagle can catch them?" "Our new eagle-shooting cannon is so fast the eagle ends up going faster than an ICBM?" "Free eagle with every ICBM purchase?"

76 brand of gasoline has a new marketing campaign going on -- Stop "honkaholism" -- about not using your car horn. There is a new billboard on my way to work with the slogan "Give a Hoot. Don't Toot." Several things about this Crack.Me.Up:

1) Does anyone remember the original '70s US Forrest Service mascot, Woodsy Owl, "Give a hoot, don't pollute"? Yeah, an oil company has just co-opted and bastardized it.

2) When I was a kid, "toot" was a popular euphemism for passing gas. So are they advising me to reduce my noise pollution or air pollution?

Logged

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." — Douglas Adams